


Here

by anythingbutgrief



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2014-07-26
Packaged: 2018-02-10 14:05:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2027868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutgrief/pseuds/anythingbutgrief
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A late-night conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here

"Don’t officers get shot first?"

The sand was sticking to Mickey’s body, his sweat an adhesive, and he felt like his skin was coming off, but the sun wasn’t even that high in the sky yet. It lingered on the horizon away from him. This heat was something different. 

When he swallowed his throat burned. 

There were figures in the distance, he realized, packing stuff onto a truck, dressed all alike. Army. 

One head stood taller than those around him. Mickey strained his eyes, tried to look for the smallest edge of red peaking out from under a helmet, but he was too far away. He had to fix that.

When he ran, his lungs burned, and he felt himself going slower and slower the closer he got to the truck, like the sand was growing, building, boxing him in, which he knew was stupid, was impossible, because the damn road was paved. 

The other guys had gotten into the truck, but Ian was still standing out, big and broad and tall, that same body that Mickey knew so well, but he couldn’t make out his face yet, so he ran harder, trying to get there faster. 

Maybe Ian had his back to him. But…but no. That wasn’t it, Mickey realized a second later, because Ian’s arm raised up to wave at him, to beckon him closer. He was waiting. _Ian is waiting on me._

His knees were creaking, making sharp clicking noises, but Mickey couldn’t fucking waste time thinking about it, pushing himself further and further until he tasted copper in his mouth, until he saw Ian’s smile spread across his welcoming face, his arms spread out now, waiting for Mickey to crash home. _  
_

Mickey opened his mouth as he ran, panting, and when he tried to talk he started to cough, like hadn’t tried to use his voice in years, but he tried again as soon as the coughs cleared. “Ian. Ian. Ian, I—”

A blistering gold-grey cloud shot from the ground, or from the sky, or somewhere. It didn’t fucking matter, because Mickey couldn’t see shit, it was everywhere, it was in his eyes and up his nose and down his throat and under his skin. It tasted like fire and steel and blood.

"Ian!" 

For a second Mickey could only hear his own heavy breathing, the urgent pounding of his own heart painfully sending blood rushing through his ears, his own hoarse voice shouting out Ian’s name in between retching coughs, but then another noise, not as deep, cut through, even though the smoke was so heavy now that Mickey couldn’t open his eyes to find the source.

"Mickey. Mickey. Mickey, are you—"

Ian, voice growing more and more urgent. Mickey stumbled forward as best he could, ignoring the hissing sound that accompanied the burn against his skin. He could literally be walking through fire. It wouldn’t matter. “Ian,” he whispered, swinging his arms out, trying to knock into something with more substance than fog. He had to get Ian out of here. He had to get Ian home.

"Mickey, please."

"I’m coming, hold on, hold on, I’m coming," he wheezed out. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t get air into his lungs and Ian was somewhere deeper into the cloud and was begging him and if he could just get his damn eyes open, if they would just fucking cooperate and let him see, if they would just…

But everything was sealed tight, bright orange of his eyelids wrapped around him, choking the life out of him, closed so tight like layers of clay on top of his coffin—

“ _Mickey_!” 

Mickey’s eyes snapped open and he was panting, sweating, shaking in the darkness of his bedroom. He was vaguely conscious of a heavy weight to his side, sinking in the bed next to him, but his lungs were still burning, eyes still stinging with tears that were half-irritation, half…..whatever. Mickey groaned with the effort of lifting his torso to fold his body against his knees, cradling his legs against his chest and gasping, ribs aching with the effort. 

A hand hesitantly touched the top of his back, in between his shoulder-blades, then dipping lower over the knobs of his spine through his shirt. “Mickey.” 

Mickey shook his head, feeling new beads of sweat slide from the hairline at his neck and down from his armpits. The hand on his back rose higher, tracing circles up to his neck and back down until it reached the hem of his shirt, slipping underneath to get at Mickey’s bare skin. Nails gently danced across his back, tracing the outlines of his shoulder-blades, around the borders of his hips, making him shiver as they rubbed along the column of his spine. 

"Bad dream?" Ian asked, voice soft.

Mickey nodded, eyes still focused on his own knees.

"Wanna talk about it?"

He shook his head, then cleared his throat, as if there was still dust inside. “Nah, it’s. It’s fine.” 

Ian kept rubbing his back, using more pressure now. “You were..it sounded like you were crying.”

"I wasn’t," Mickey shot back a second later, defensive. And he wasn’t, right? There wasn’t time for that, in the dream. 

"Upset, anyway. Like you were screaming underwater." Ian’s hand had drifted back up to his neck now, squeezing and kneading like only he knew how to do, making Mickey rock back into his touch. "I had to shout at you to wake you up." 

Oh. That’s why it felt so real. 

"It’s okay to tell me, you know." 

"It’s fine.  _Really_.” Mickey felt himself getting annoyed, which was its own source of comfort, feeling himself gradually losing that sick hopeless desperation still sitting in his bones, like wringing stubborn water out of a towel.

Ian’s fingers lifted from his neck to comb slowly through Mickey’s sweat-damp hair. “Hey, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you a bad dream I had this week if you tell me yours.”

Mickey sighed and felt a smile threatening to stake its claim on his face, even though he still faced away from Ian. “Yeah, yeah, go ahead, Gallagher. I know you just want an excuse to talk.” But it was a long thirty seconds before Ian spoke, like he was nervous or something.

"A couple nights ago. I dreamed that you left me. Like, in the dream it was months after you left me. And you were getting married again."

"Ian—"

Ian’s other hand came around to grasp at Mickey’s jaw before slipping around to cover Mickey’s mouth. “Shush. Let me finish first.” 

Mickey smiled without thinking about it, and then, because he knew Ian could probably feel that, could probably feel the flush rising on Mickey's cheek under his touch, because he had nothing to lose, he pecked against Ian’s palm, once, twice, three times. There was a long pause, and Mickey half-expected Ian to pull back entirely in surprise, but after a moment Ian’s fingers stroked along his jaw, and Mickey kissed his hand again, a signal to continue. 

"You were getting married again. And I showed up, like an idiot, again, but this time I couldn’t see you before the wedding. So I just watched it happen. And this time…it was a man." 

"Fucking  _who_?” Mickey asked, barely audible against Ian’s hand, but clearly enough.

"I don’t know. I didn’t see his face. It didn’t matter. I was watching you and you were, you were so fucking happy. You were holding his hand and smiling and you looked so fucking free, and you didn’t see me at all." 

Ian’s grip had loosened, and his hand started to fall from Mickey’s face, but Mickey grabbed it, kept it against his mouth as he kissed the inside of fingers, one by one, then back and forth again, Ian’s hands starting to tremble under his lips. “You know the worst part?” Ian continued. 

Mickey shook his head but kept kissing along Ian’s fingers. 

"I woke up and felt like, you know, hollow. Like you do after a bad dream. But I thought, I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe it was a good dream."

“ _How_? How the  _fuck_?”

"You were happy." 

"No," Mickey said, resuming his kisses against Ian’s hand, now drifting down his palm to his wrist, right above his pulse. "No." 

"You  _were_ , though,” Ian insisted, voice growing more urgent, sounding way too much like he had in the dream. “You were, when you could get out of this….shit.”

"Ian. I promise you. I wasn’t." He dropped their hands to his waist, but twisted his fingers together with Ian’s. "I couldn’t be." 

Ian’s breath puffed out heavily against his hair, and he shifted around behind him, noisily enough that Mickey worried he was pulling back entirely, going to his side of the bed, but instead he wrapped around him, putting his legs on either side of Mickey’s, resting his chin against Mickey’s head, his neck, his shoulder, before sagging back and pulling them both against the pillows. Mickey thought for a second that he could sink into Ian’s body like wrapping himself into a winter coat. 

But Ian’s voice, still thick with emotion, cut through the warm haze. “Deal, Mickey. Say yours.”

Mickey felt a spark of panic in his stomach, his body telling him to run, but he kept still. “I never agreed, you know….”

“ _Say yours._  It’s only fair.”

And, no, no, it wasn’t fair, Mickey thought. It wasn’t fair when it cost Ian less to share these things, when he could tell Mickey these things without feeling like he was being disemboweled. But neither was the sensation of Ian’s fingertips roaming again against his scalp. And neither was knowing that Ian’s nightmare was that Mickey could grow better outside of him, when really a world outside of Ian only meant dust and smoke and blindness. So Mickey fixed his gaze on the ugly jut of his own bony kneecap, thought about his own stupid rotting skeleton stripped bare in a cloud of smoke, and opened his mouth to speak. 

"You were….you were in some fucking…..I don’t know, fucking war zone or some shit. Like when you were in the army." 

"Mick," Ian interjected, tone more admonishing. "I never got anywhere close to leaving the country."

Mickey groaned. “Look, forget about it, let’s just go back to sleep.” If Ian wanted to have a “your dream is dumber than mine” contest, he could take the fucking trophy now as far as Mickey was concerned.

"No, come on, you’re not going back to sleep tonight, I know you." And he did, Mickey realized, because he could tell just by the way his fingers still shook that there was no way he was going to be able to slink back into oblivion, there was no way he could do anything but stare up at the ceiling and replay the images in his head over and over and over again. "Come on, Mick. Talk. What was I doing in the army?"

"I don’t even, I don’t fucking know. You were just standing around and I was trying to get to you and there was like a bomb or something," he mumbled, feeling stupid.

After a minute, probably waiting for Mickey to continue, Ian pressed a kiss against Mickey’s ear, whispering, “Well, you don’t have to worry about that. No bombs. No bombs here.” 

Ian sounded confident, sure, like maybe he had been expecting worse out of Mickey’s brain, but somehow that didn’t make him feel better. Because a part of him wanted to protest, to say that Ian was wrong, that there were plenty of bombs here, but he bit his lip instead, bending back into Ian’s touch as he pressed kisses along Mickey’s neck. 

Mickey hated himself for speaking more, but he had to. “Maybe. Maybe I dream about that thing because I don’t want to think about where you really were.” He cleared his throat. “Maybe it’s easier.”

Ian’s lips paused against his skin, but he didn’t prompt him for more, probably didn’t want to talk about that time, about where he really was. Because maybe Ian had bombs of his own, maybe there were things that Ian couldn’t speak about without feeling like his gut was being torn apart, just like Mickey.

Mickey stroked along Ian’s fingers, soft and slow. “Don’t—don’t leave again, okay?”

"I wasn’t planning on it," Ian murmured against his ear, tone light and teasing.

Mickey’s grip tightened on Ian’s hand. “I mean it. Don’t fucking go anywhere.”

"You really think I’m planning on it?" Ian said, voice soft, but somehow even in the dim light, when Mickey twisted his head around, he could see Ian’s eyes, round and hurt-looking.

"No, I just—"

"No, you just don’t trust me. You just don’t think that I’m—that I can hold myself together anymore." Ian’s voice had this hard note of certainty to it that made Mickey’s chest ache.

"It ain’t that."

"Yes, it is."

Mickey twisted around more so that he was facing him entirely, planting his knees on each side of Ian’s hips. “No. No, come on. It ain’t that. It’s not about you. It’s….everything else.” _I trust you. I don’t trust the world._  “I want you here.” Mickey paused, chewing his lip, looking down at where his hand was still tied up with Ian’s. “I need you here. You don’t know how bad things were when you….you don’t know.” 

"Okay," Ian said, voice even. "You can tell me. What it was like."

Mickey smiled and shook his head. “No, I really…I really can’t tell you. I really can’t.” Because where the fuck were the words for that, for the world of dust that had eaten him whole when Ian was away? Where were the words? 

Ian’s arm came around him, wrapped around his back to push Mickey against his chest. “Okay,” he said again, going back to play with Mickey’s hair. 

And that should have been the end of it, should have been the last word, should have been Mickey’s excuse to stay quiet for the rest of the night, Ian no longer pushing him. But he spoke against Ian’s collarbone, tasting his skin. “It was  _bad_. You just have to trust me about that.” 

And Ian pulled him closer, tighter, holding him so hard their bones crushed together uncomfortably, but Mickey nestled in deep into Ian’s neck, breathing in until his lungs burned in an entirely different way. “I’m gonna,” Ian promised into his hair. “But, um. This? This is  _good_ , okay? You just have to trust me about that, Mickey. I’m here.”

"Okay," Mickey breathed out, rubbing his hand up and down Ian’s chest, feeling his breathing go ragged. He wasn’t whole. Neither of them were. 

"I’m here," Ian repeated, murmuring a chain of, "I am. I am. I’m here, Mickey," voice trembling.

"You  _are_ ,” Mickey said, and kissed his mouth like a thank-you, like a promise, like an answer to a question he could feel in the way Ian shook against him. “You’re with me.”


End file.
